


Why is Everyone Going Back to Jakku?

by TehanuFromEarthsea



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Kylo Ren Redemption, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:02:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6584338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehanuFromEarthsea/pseuds/TehanuFromEarthsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herakles: If only I could become a rock, unfeeling, oblivious of evil. (Euripides, <i> Herakles </i>)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>*   *   *</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why is Everyone Going Back to Jakku?

Tuanul village.

He knew exactly what he would find. He knew how the desert could erase things. How the wind and sand gnawed away at everything on Jakku.

There were holes in some of the wattle and daub huts. The shifting sands had almost covered others, pouring in through the doors and windows. Strips of cloth fluttered from the remains of temporary shelters, little more than stacks of sticks.

The vaporator tower still stood. Some mechanism creaked fitfully within it. Kylo Ren pushed open the door to the underground cistern. A cool black cavern under the desert. His eyes adjusted slowly. The tank was empty but for a damp stain in the middle. Occasionally the silence was broken by a drop of water falling from somewhere above.

He walked up the steps back to the outside. Heat like a blow to the temples, and dazzling light. When his parents hoped he would return to the light, they had not meant it like this. He was sure of that.

Sweat was slicking his skin and sticking his clothes to him. He couldn’t see the use of them now. Laboriously he peeled off everything except a loose under-tunic and pants. Even then he felt as though he was melting in one of Snoke’s Force-tortures. How had Rey stood this heat, year after year, he wondered.

He stood dumbly in the shade of one of the huts for a while. Stood, and then sat. The wind had dropped and the vaporator mechanism had stopped creaking. The nearest huts and the walls of Kelvin Ravine cut off the long views of the desert, but he was still cupped in sizzling light, in profound silence. Even with his eyes shut, the light burned. Burned into his brain, burned out the maddening voices that had plagued him. The silence, at last, was within as well as without.

He would stare into the Jakku sun itself for that gift.

So there was the thing, though. The place he did not want to look at. There in the middle.

He knew the way the desert winds would work on the bones, bleaching and whitening even the burnt ones. He’d studied a few datafiles before returning, and knew that there were predators here. Gnaw-jaws. They would have mauled the remains.

A sensible person would see if the vaporator could be fixed. There were camouflage covers he could put over his shuttlecraft. Perimeter warning sensors he could erect.

He did none of those things. His brain felt like raw meat. When the sun moved, he moved to follow the shadow. The day passed. His tongue thickened in his mouth and it hurt to swallow. Soon he would go back to the ship for water, he told himself, but never quite found the impulse to move.

There was something near his foot, he noticed. The end of a thighbone, cracked, the marrow sucked out. Burned black at the end. The smell must have been appalling when it happened, he thought. He’d had his mask on, so he wouldn’t have known.

It seemed wrong to leave it there, all on its own, separated from the rest. A lonely bone. He picked it up and slogged slowly through the sand towards the place. It could have some company there.

The bone clacked onto the pile of other bones he was refusing to look at. Almost a musical sound. That probably meant it was happy, said a timid mouse voice in his mind. There were probably other bones around looking for home. Lonely bones, lonely bones. The words made a staggery rhythm, and the rhythm drove his feet. The staggery way you walk on sand, he thought.

Bending down to gather up more bones, he nearly passed out. He wiped his forehead but it was dry. No more moisture to sweat out. He would never get this job done, he thought, glancing around the troubled sands of what had been the village centre. He slogged back to his ship, a dream walk, climbed in and made his way to the galley. Water. Drink slowly, slowly. Knowledge he’d cribbed from Rey somehow, some time. Slowly, or he’d vomit.

The sun was lower when he came back out of the ship. Picking things up. They might have been belt buckles or tools. Precious to somebody. Put them all on the pile.

The sun dropped behind the walls of the ravine and for a moment the village was bathed in a rose-coloured haze from the dust hanging above it, caught in the lowering rays. A moment of beauty. Then blue dusk, concealing everything, but soon enough the stars came blazing out in glory above everything. Rey must have known them well once.

Some large-sounding creatures howled, not too far away. That would be the gnaw-jaws, he guessed. He trudged to where the raised black wings of his ship cut triangles out of the jewelled sky. Up the ramp and into his cabin.

Fever dreams. Snoke tried to talk to him but his voice sounded like the whispery creak of the broken vaporator. Kylo couldn’t understand him. Couldn’t see his hologram through the furnace light of the dream sun.

The next morning he was up before the sun reached into the village. The gnaw-jaws had been busy all night and the bones were scattered again. Patiently he gathered them up. He was prepared this time, with a water bottle so he could revive himself as the heat got up.

Obviously the bones needed protection, he thought.

It took days to build a cairn that would keep the gnaw-jaws out. He found a makeshift sled and used it to haul rocks from a talus below the nearest ravine wall. He would have kept working on it longer, but one of Jakku’s famous dust-storms blew up. The breath of R’iia. Days of it. Every now and then he’d stare out the viewport. It gave him satisfaction to catch a glimpse of the dim outline of the cairn through the smoking veils of sand. Something solid he’d made in the whirling world outside. Nobody would ever know who built it or why it was there, but still it was something.

Not the same as writing his name in blood across the history books of the Galaxy, but perhaps that had not been wholly his own dream.

The ship would run out of water soon. Then he could either fix the vaporator or not. He’d prefer not to fix it, but his body would probably rebel against that plan. It wanted to keep on living, for whatever stupid reason bodies liked to do that.

He’d once told Rey how his grandmother Padme had lost the will to live after birthing her children, and she’d died of it. It was one of the times he’d seen Rey the angriest: a sharp reminder that she’d seen and cared about things that had never crossed his mind.

Rey had blasted back along their Force-link to say that if the malnourished, beaten, hopeless, weeping and abused women she’d seen could survive birthing children they did not want and couldn’t support, then she very much doubted Padme could die of a mere broken heart. A week later she’d come back into his head to tell him she thought Padme was probably assassinated. Whether that was a peace-offering, or what it was, they hadn’t linked again for a month after that.

Best if he didn’t think about Rey any more. Thoughts of Rey still had the power to cut through the muffling sun-fried blanket of numbness he’d built.

Weeks passed. Inevitably he found himself climbing up inside the vaporator tower. He thought he would be too weak. Arms shaking. Surprisingly the Force wafted him up, though he had no sense of calling on it. He was becoming transparent, light, a dry leaf. He wasn’t even conscious of what he did to fix the vaporator, the Force singing through his fingers as he tightened and straightened and made whole the broken things. He was just a tool. Always had been. If his heart wanted to keep beating another day, fine. In its service, he’d fix the vaporator, and drink again.

The teedos must have smelt water. They came by, a group of five, the next day. Kylo watched them from his habitual station slumped in the shade against a landing strut of his ship. They clustered around the door to the cistern, one wary head always turned to keep watch on him.

“Go on, take it,” he wanted to say, but his voice came out so harshly that it sounded as though he was still wearing his helmet. Too much effort. He gestured with one hand. The teedos filed down into the cistern one at a time, carrying their catch bottles. Afterwards they formed a group to look at the cairn Kylo had built. A short conference followed. Then they turned to him in unison and made a weird bobbing motion. One of them addressed Kylo in their clear, percussive language. They bobbed again, calling out a phrase in chorus. One of them laid something on the ground, and they all left at once.

Whatever it was they’d left, he ignored it until the sand had blown over it. It never reappeared.

The vaporator had been designed to supply a whole village. The cistern filled. One night Kylo was woken by the overflow pumps thumping into life. He ignored the sound. The next morning the open-walled shade-tanks beside the tower had water in them. A day later, a flock of desert hens arrived in a clatter of wings, yawping triumphantly. They’d found the water.

So he’d made an oasis. The silence was gone. Nibbled to death by all kinds of small creatures that peeped and scuttled around the tanks. Hammered to death at last by the steelpeckers, who’d discovered palatable ores on his ship and lost all fear of him. He shooed them away when the noise got too much. He took to filling an old water container first thing in the morning and heading up to the valley rim with it. There he could sit all day and watch the dunes move, grain by grain, from horizon to horizon.

The cairn grew, stone by stone. The wind uncovered more bones, some of them miraculously undamaged. He could look at them now. The delicate articulation of a foot that could fit in the palm of his hand. A child had skimmed across the sand, once, feather-footed. A hand, like a fabulous white flower. They deserved a better memorial. He built more carefully, fitting the stones together. It would never be beautiful, but he did what he could.

His clothes bleached to grey and tore into tatters. His skin burned, blistered, then finally tanned under its coat of ground-in dust.

It was impossible for a ship like his to remain unnoticed on a planet whose entire economy subsisted on scavenging. One day a group of people arrived, bristling with weapons and loaded down with breathing equipment. Impossible to tell what species they were. From the canyon rim he watched them slink towards the open hatchway. Watched them dance with excitement to find the ship empty. They stole it with unseemly haste. Kylo didn’t bother to wave as the ship passed him at eye level.

Funny, he’d never bothered to name the thing. It only had a few days’ rations left anyway. Now he’d have to eat the chickens and their eggs, like any savage.

He was nothing. Occasionally Snoke’s mind barely touched his, brushing past along some tide of the Force, on its way to find somebody better suited to his needs. A useless, broken thing like him was of no interest to Snoke. He was free.

 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a longer fic I'm going to write. I need to bring Kylo to this point somehow. This is not his redemption, but the point where I feel his redemption is possible. So then we move on from here to somewhere better, I hope.
> 
> Thoughts? Dark enough?


End file.
